In this post, I talk about our latest EuroVis news, give a quick break-down of my activities of the past week whilst turning my productivity glut into a game, sing an ode to DropBox, get threatened with a lawsuit (again) and impart, as per usual, some applied backyard philosophy.
All hail the beautiful EuroVis 2010 logo!
To kick start this blog post, allow me to get this off my chest: BOTH Stef Busking’s paper on the
Welcome to the latest edition of the Weekly Head Voices, in which I briefly touch upon the, to my mind, mention-worthy events that took place within my field of observation during week 5 of the year 2010, and with which I too finally have an excuse to (ab)use the famous words of Magritte for my dubious ends. :)
WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAMME FOR THE FOLLOWING IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:
I’m officially not supposed to talk about this until the next edition of the Weekly Head Voices, but it’s too big and too cool to keep quiet about until then. Google has just released Buzz, their location-based status / media updating system, and it’s fantastically cool. I’ve just posted my first Buzz via Google Maps 4.0 on my E71 (I think I’m the third buzz in Delft EVAR). Don’t know what Buzz is? Check this YouTube clip:
My Tall Philosophical Neighbour (henceforth TPN) blogged today about the iCalmDown, which, as you know, is the latest Apple product released with perhaps a tad too much fanfare this past week. Yes, I do realise that I’m most privileged to have a tall neighbour who’s both philosophical and manages to blog with more regularity than many. In any case, in a cut-and-dried case of keepin’ up with the Joneses, or the TBN in this case, you are now holding in your hands the eleventh edition of the Weekly Head Voices, documenting a selection of events taking place in week 4 of 2010. Please let me know if you’re reading this on your iCalmDown!
SuSE engineers consider this dog to be "quite pretty" and also "so cute and cuddly".
HI THERE KIDS!
You might have thought that my Weekly Head Voices were a thing of the past, but I unfortunately have to disappoint you yet again. The weekly head voices will continue in 2010, in spite of slip-ups like this one, where I’m going to have to stuff three weeks of inconsequentialities into the room usually reserved for a single week of inconsequentialities. Whatever the case may be, welcome to this edition, covering weeks 1, 2 and 3 of 2010!
A fine day in beautiful Bergen, on our way to have lunch.
Holiday feeling.
Yes, that up there is my foot. Next to my beer. On my balcony. Overlooking my ocean and my clouds…
It was a ridiculously lovely holiday, with the only drawback that I wasn’t able to take more people along on it. Fear not, soon my Master Plan will come to fruition, in which my significant other will become famously rich and I’ll be able to charter a Family and Friends Boeing (or an Airbus, depending on the rules that govern such things at that time), and you’ll all be able to tag along on my Ridiculously Lovely holiday. Fear not, for I will not forget you.
Hey kids, this would have been the Weekly Head Voices #10, but since the past week can be really compactly summarised (4 hours of lecturing, 8 hours of lab supervision, 1 M.Sc. defense, 15 hours of meetings, 1 brilliant going-away party), I’ve decided to dedicate this week’s post to something completely different, something that one or two of you might even find useful!
Image copyright Grant Neufeld.
I’ve unfortunately not been involved in any quantum entanglement accidents recently — teaching duties are mostly to be blamed for my two-week silence. Besides spending at least a whole work-day every week on our Data Visualisation practical, I’ve been lecturing and also been preparing a new lecture block on information visualisation with a dash of visual data analysis. Due to my not secretly being an infovis expert, this latter activity has taken up quite a chunk of my time and effort. On the other hand, the exercise has forced me to acquire a significant amount of new infovis brain juice which I’ll probably soon be applying to impressive effect.
Dear readers,
Due to a small accident with a friend’s quantum entanglement device, I briefly got stuck in a high pressure reality vortex. The headaches have subsided, but I do still seem to be suffering from slight time compression artifacts. In any case, that’s why there’s only this one edition of the Weekly Head Voices to cover weeks 43 to 45. As is always the case, please make use of the bolded phrases to guide you through this post. In other words, the fat words tell you what you you might find interesting so that you can skip the rest.
Today The Next Web posted an episode of BBC Watchdog where it was demonstrated how a GMail account was hacked through insecure (WEP) WiFi.
For those of you still wondering, I’d like to confirm that it is indeed possible to hack a GMail account over insecure WiFi: GMail does indeed always send your password through secure HTTP (SSL) so that this can’t be directly hacked, BUT, by default, the rest of your session happens through normal clear-text HTTP. The Watchdog episode of course gives absolutely no technical details, but it’s most probably the “sidejacking” attack first published by Robert Graham, where the attacker reads the cookies of the post-authentication HTTP traffic and uses them to fool GMail into thinking that they are in fact the legitimate owners attacked GMail account. This attack works on other webmail and -service providers too.
On Wednesday evening I was putting the finishing touches on probably the most important presentation I’ve given in the past few years. As I was testing everything on my trusty little netbook just before bed-time, two scary problems reared their ugly heads: 1) An embedded MS-MPEG4 encoded AVI simply showed a black box when played and, perhaps even more disheartening, 2) the last and most important slide took between 4 and 6 seconds to appear.
The people that brought you PowerPoint.